Cybersecurity and Beyond: Why Secure Procurement is a Must for Your Organization

Welcome back to our two-part interview with Sonatype’s VP of Security, Mike Griffin. In the previous installment, we began discussing how companies are made up of what they build, borrow, and buy, and how Sonatype helps with that they build (software) and borrow (source code).

Today’s installment continues the conversation and focuses on what companies buy (procurement) to make sure that what they’ve built and borrowed run properly, and how Sonatype helps make sure that this process is secure.

What are the benefits of mature procurement beyond reducing risk?

Mature procurement does more than just provide better levels of safety, it can also lead to improved sales enablement. When you know what to expect from your vendors, you develop a better understanding of the questions your customers are going to ask. This means that you’ll be able to provide better and faster answers.

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One of the biggest problems is that organizations have a tendency to delay implementing anything but basic procurement systems and practices. You’ll find this is especially true when they’re small; they choose to focus on other things because they don’t have the headcount to properly monitor and manage procurement security as they should. 

However, your organization is a link in the supply chain that your customers are purchasing from; they obviously want to know the health and hygiene of the companies they do business with. But part of providing that information about your own company is knowing the same things about the services and vendors that you’re bringing to the customer’s table. 

To put it simply: the correlation between sales and procurement is more relevant than you might immediately think, they’re really different lenses of the same function.

What can organizations do better procurement-wise?

As with our recommendations about what makes up software (Read more...)